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Discussion: limitations and recommendations
In discussing my methodology, I described a few limitations that affected and shaped my work. Traveling back home during a pandemic, getting infected and navigating restrictions and lockdowns, traveling back to Amsterdam and readjusting to different locales all slowed down my fieldwork, analysis and writing timelines. Being immensely engaged in the topic, as it is emotionally heavy, highly sensitive and personal, I had trouble grounding my research academically and detaching some emotions from the analysis. My positionality and network allowed me to a specific access to a number of people, that is not perhaps conclusive of the general population. However, reflecting on these potential limitations these experiences shaped the knowledge I acquired and presented, as situated. In attending to different ethical ontological and political levels, “situated knowledges allow us to give “a more adequate, richer, better account of a world to live in it well and in critical, reflexive” ways (Haraway 1991: 187).
There is a topic that I had to leave out from my analysis, even though it was common and relevant. That is the discussion on mental wounds. As I studied the material, social and political aspects of wounds, the mental/psychological becomes a potential point that is left out from the focus. The psychological aspect of the overall experience and the topic of mental wounds came up a lot during my interviews.
From my small sample size, it became clear how different people live and relate differently to their wounds and scars, even if there are many commonalities. The same can be said about mental wounds and psychological trauma in the city. However, discussing mental wellbeing is not exclusive to wounded and injured individuals. The August 4, 2020 explosion affected a whole population, many lost their home, their job, and many lost friends and family members. To attend to mental wounds requires a bigger sampling and a longer period of time.
Moreover, my theoretical framework was built on studying physical wounds and attend to their material, relational, affective social and political aspects, where including the mental and psychological required a literature reading into trauma studies from the region and different theoretical turns.
…Sure, I got injured and broke a part of my body but what if the heart breaks […]. A heartbreak is worse…
…My wounds taught me that you can never know how much strong you are until you really have to be strong and it’s not a choice to have. They taught me that what doesn’t kill you for real makes you stronger. Before, I used to think okay yeah whatever but now, physically AND mentally, what did not kill me, really made me stronger. My wounds on my body, I love them but if we are going to talk about the real wound, it’s the mental. WoundS, with an S…
These excerpts from my interviews translate how important it is to look at the mental and psychological woundedness embedded in experiencing not only a physical injury, but also in seeing your home or workplace collapse in front of you, seeing blood, death, and a whole city mourning its destruction. Studying mental wounds and trauma however require further
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reading, a different methodological and ethical planning, and different form of training, one which I did not see myself of having. It is no question that violence in the region has scarred the people living there. In order to locate psychological wounds of war, Moghnieh (2017) looks at destroyed infrastructure, visits cafes and pubs to engage in conversations, and uses her own experiences of having lived in the violence (surviving bombs and attacks) to detect concepts such as resilience and suffering (Moghnieh 2017: 28-32). She suggests researching humanitarian knowledge practices of violence, trauma and the politics of suffering in Lebanon through grounding everyday experiences of violence and the practice of “living-in-violence”
(Moghnieh 2017: 25). She lays out an important framework for ethnographic study of psychological woundedness in Lebanon. Building on this, I suggest studying mental and physical wounds of post-explosion Beirut as not being separate entities and grounding them in daily experiences of violence, daily care practices and communal debates.
Academic relevance and contribution
My thesis brings its modest contribution to the studies of wounds in anthropology, sociology, medical anthropology and sociology, and medical humanities. I unpack wounds from a material semiotic approach and get inspiration by concepts and theorizing from scholars from new materialism, post-humanism and science and technology studies. I conduct a material-political, social and philosophical study of wounds embedded in ethnography, reading of local contexts and a turn to the city. The explosion of August 4, 2020 was a violent, tragic and criminal event that heavily impacted a whole city, country and nation. My study adds to a larger research on the impact of crises on bodies and connects to wider academic conversations on attending to the human aspect of violent disasters and state-level crimes. Finally, I propose to adopt ethnography as a vital tool in the research of wounds and wounded cities, and to shed light on human tragedies.
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